Customer Experience Analytics Formula Blog

Your customers interact with your business across multiple channels, applications and devices, making it challenging to visualize and understand your customers’ cumulative behaviors. Compounding this challenge is the fact that information on your customers’ various interactions can be contained in various solutions, making it difficult to gain an aggregate view of your customers’ paths and behaviors that can be used to help you identify issues and realize opportunities.

Analysis Overview

Using IBM Universal Behavior Exchange (UBX), you can easily share customer data between UBX-enabled products, including Tealeaf Customer Experience (CX) on Cloud, to quickly broaden your understanding of your customers and their behaviors -- providing you the ability to solve problems within a shared customer context and to recognize business opportunities.

Analysis Benefits

Utilize UBX’s simple browser-based user interface to quickly and easily define the data exchange between UBX-enabled products that you already own without the expense, delay and complication of custom integrations

Solve problems within a shared customer context by seamlessly combining customer behavior data from unique solutions into a comprehensive view.

How does UBX work?

UBX syndicates data in real-time from endpoints. The data syndicated includes events (which capture a single customer behavior) and audiences (which are segments or groups of customers.) Endpoints are the solutions that send data through UBX, and they syndicate data through UBX as Publishers, Destinations, or both. Publishers register and send events and audience information to UBX, while the Destination endpoints, or Subcribers, register and receive events and audiences.

Each customer event that enters the UBX system can come from a different channel or data source and can use different ways to identify the customer. The UBX identity service determines where those identities overlap, allowing individual seemingly separate events to be understood as the actions of a single customer.

As UBX receives customer events, it attempts to join the incoming identifiers with the identifiers that exist in its identity database. Overtime, the UBX identity service joins unique identifier information that might be common across multiple applications that you define as UBX endpoints in the same user account. The result provides the continuous and evolving view of the customer in multiple context.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will assist you with setting up Tealeaf CX on Cloud data to pass through Universal Behavior Exchange, allowing for the selective exchange of event, audience and identity data between various applications, and offering a broader understanding of your customers and their behaviors.

For our CXA formula example, we will consider the following scenario: Tealeaf CX on Cloud as the Publisher, Customer Experience Analytics as the Subscriber and Form Field Repeat Struggle as the customer Event.

Note: While this example features the IBM Tealeaf CX on Cloud and Customer Experience Analytics solutions, any UBX-enabled products can be registered in UBX including various IBM, IBM Business Partner, third party solutions and your own internal applications.

To get started with accessing UBX:

If you are already in the IBM Marketing Cloud using IBM Digital Analytics (DA) or using another qualified IBM commerce application, simply fill out a form to request access to IBM UBX. You will receive a log in and password to access the cloud based UBX system.

If you are an IBM Business Partner and want to take advantage of UBX, register or sign in to IBM PartnerWorld. You will need to be an independent software vendor (ISV) to get started.

1. Verify your event type is supported in UBX

Before getting started with registering your endpoints, use the Dynamic Event Library in UBX to verify that the event type you will want to use for your particular business use case (like cart abandonments, for example) is supported in UBX. Dynamic Event Library can also be used to determine which UBX partners publish or subcribe to specific event types.

To get started with Dynamic Event library:

Go to top left Hamburger menu

From the menu, select “Dynamic Event Library” which will open in a new tab

In top right, select “Select Publishers and Subscribers”

Set Tealeaf CX on Cloud as the Publisher, as Tealeaf CX on Cloud event data will be passed through UBX in this example.

Select your desired Subscriber.

As UBX is an open system, there are many endpoints that can be registered in UBX, including IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics (CXA), IBM Campaign, Demand Side Platforms (DSP), Demand Management Platforms (DMP) and more.

Select relevant category of event type (see screenshot example below)

Verify that event is supported by the Publisher and Subscriber

Use the Dynamic Event Library in UBX to select a category and event type to verify that your event is supported by the Publisher and Subscriber.

2. Register endpoints in UBX

As endpoints are the solutions that send data through UBX, you will need to register the appropriate endpoints in UBX for use in your UBX account. For our example, Tealeaf CX on Cloud will be registered as a Publisher in UBX.

To register a new endpoint, do the following:

On the Endpoints tab, click “Register new endpoint.” The endpoint registration wizard will display.

Note: The Endpoint registration wizard lists UBX endpoints for products and solutions that have completed an evaluation process and provide a way for you to submit your access credentials. You can filter the list by endpoint provider. If the endpoint that you want to register does not appear on the list, you must register it as a custom endpoint.

Select the endpoint that you want to register and click “Next.” For our example, select “Tealeaf CX on Cloud” as a publisher, and “Customer Experience Analytics” as a subscriber.

Provide the information that the endpoint provider requires as part of the registration request (i.e. information about your organization and UBX account is required to proceed with the registration process.) When you have finished entering the information, click “Next.”

If you entered registration information into the registration wizard, UBX transmits the information to the endpoint provider so that the provider can complete the registration. The endpoint displays on the Endpoints tab as “Pending” until IBM and the endpoint provider completes the registration and then the status changes to “Active.”

3. Subscribe to Events

When you log into UBX for the first time, you will have no event subscriptions. To subscribe to Events, do the following:

From the Events tab, click “Subscribe to events.”

Select “Tealeaf CX on Cloud”

When subscribing to Events in UBX you will need to select your Publisher and Destination

C From the list of available events, select the one or more relevant events you want to send. For our example, select “Form Field Repeat Struggle.”

D. Next, you will need to select the destination for the event(s.) Under “Select Destination,” select your desired Subscriber.

Select the one or more relevant events you want to send when subscribing to events in UBX

E. Click “Subscribe.” The publisher and destination will now appear in the Events tab.

4. Verify that the Publisher is sending data

Go to Tealeaf CX on Cloud application

Select an event that captures Form field repeat struggle and map it to “Form Field Repeat Struggle”

Under Category, select “User Struggle”

Under Event, select “Form Field Repeat Struggle”

Now map event attributes either as event objects or custom. Map event attributes to the relevant event object.

Every event subscribed to in UBX must be mapped. Event mapping is

similar to the reference value of Tealeaf events.

D. Click “Save” in upper right after completing event mapping.

As customers today can engage with your business across all channels, using UBX allows you to pull together disjointed customer information from various data sources, offering a more comprehensive and broader understanding of your customers behaviors. For example, if you wanted to visualize the journeys customers take with your business, you could use UBX to combine the customer behavior data from Tealeaf CX on Cloud with the robust reporting in Watson CXA to create a journey report to analyze the various customer paths and journeys – allowing you to easily identify the top-performing paths or realize the paths that may encounter struggle.

If you would like help on how to create a journey report in Watson CXA to visualize the customer journeys for your business, please access our CXA Formula, “Creating Journey Reports to Understand Customer Journeys and Optimize Conversions,” by clicking here.

Your customers are engaging with your business across many different journeys – with customer interactions taking place over multiple channels, devices and visits -- and engagements occurring anywhere and anytime. At the same time, in a competitive environment where your customers have increasing expectations to enjoy optimal experiences at every touchpoint, addressing the challenge of visualizing and understanding your customers’ complete journeys is essential for enriching experiences, building loyal customers, and maximizing conversions.

Visualize a consolidated view of customer journeys to recognize the most traveled paths, the shortest paths, the paths that generate the most revenue and the paths that are most successful in leading to conversions.

Identify where customers may struggle or succeed in their paths and drill down for a deeper understanding of customer journeys and the source of customer friction or customer conversions.

Examine how activity in one customer path may impact performance in other paths, allowing you to optimize all customer journeys and increase conversions in all channels.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will assist you with creating customer journey reports in Watson CXA to offer you a complete view of the multi-channel paths your customer take, enabling you to identify the paths that are the most relevant to your business, such as paths that lead to conversions or paths that top-tier buyers pursue, allowing you to drill deeper and uncover insight you can use to optimize all channels and customer journeys. In addition, the analysis of journey reports can also assist you with evaluating the paths that may require additional optimization to increase conversions.

Components of journey reports

As you can configure journey reports to focus on analysis of particular audiences or specific customer interactions pertinent to your business, it is first helpful to understand the key components of journey reports.

Audiences: A journey report can be configured to include all of your customers or just a specific audience, such as top-tier buyers or customers from a specific demographic group.

Top paths: Top paths are identified through four metrics, including path duration, most traveled,average revenue generated per customer and how many unique customers traveled the path.Journey reports can be configured to include the top five paths in the report results or only the top path.

Touch points: A touch point is the starting point or the ending point for a path in a journey report. You must define at least one touch point—a start point or an end point -- or you can define both a start point and an end point.

Range of interactions: Touch points are the foundation that defines where the path starts or ends. If you define both a start and end point for a path, the path results include all interactions that occurred between the two touch points. If you define only a start point as a touch point, you can specify how many days from the start point you want to look forward for interactions. If you define only an end point, you can specify how many days from the end point to look backward for interactions.

Creating customer journey reports

To create a journey report in Watson CXA to visualize the customer journey paths or patterns that you want to analyze for your business, do the following:

In the navigation panel, click Create > Journey report.

From the Audience menu of the report builder panel, click the Edit icon to select an audience, or accept the default value of All customers.

In the Interactions menu, click the Starting or Ending icon, or click one of the touch points on the page to add an interaction. Then, select an interaction to associate with the touch point.

Accept the default date range to report on or you may click Modify to change it.

While optional, you can add one or more filter conditions to the event by doing the following:

Click Add filter and select an event attribute and operator from the lists.

Enter a value to filter on. If you want to add another filter criterion, click +.

Select the filtering logic that you want to use from the list at the top of the window and then click Apply:

Satisfy all below applies AND logic to the filter processing where events must meet all of the listed filter conditions to be included in the results.

Satisfy any below applies OR logic to the filter processing where events that meet any of the listed filter conditions are included in the results.

Then click Apply to add the interaction to the report configuration.

Note: If you want to define another interaction, repeat the process of selecting an interaction, date range and filter conditions (if applicable.)

In the Look period menu, you can specify the number of days in the range or accept the default range of 14 days.

Note: If your path includes both a starting interaction and an ending interaction, you do not need to specify a look-back or look-forward range, as the report results will include all interactions that occurred between the starting and ending interactions.

Enter the number of days to look back or forward in the box and then click Done

From the Metrics menu, select a criteria for ranking the paths in the report results:

Top journeys of individual metric. This option returns results for the top five journeys ranked according to the metric you select: Most traveled, Duration, Average revenue, or Unique customers.

Top journey for all metrics. This option returns the top journey for each of the four metrics.

To compile your journey report, click Generate. You can then accept the default report name or change it or add a description. Save your report by clicking Save.

Accessing and analyzing journey reports

Watson CXA processes two report types for your customers’ journeys: Channel Analysis and Pattern Analysis. By default, a journey report opens with the journey channel analysis results displayed when you click Manage > Journey reports and select the report you want from the list. By then clicking on the Report type menu, you can switch to the journey pattern analysis results for your report.

Analyzing journey patterns: Helps you discover the sequences of customer behavior that have the greatest impact on the customer journey by using journey pattern analysis.

Using customer journey reports

While there are many use cases for customer journey reports, for this formula example we will apply journey channel analysis to analyze and understand the customer journeys that led to conversions and use this insight to successfully support a new product launch.

Configure the journey report to understand the paths of top-tier buyers

As we want to better understand what led the top-tier buyers to convert on previous purchases of similar products, we configure the journey report to show only the paths that were taken by these buyers by selecting Top Tier Buyers from the Audience menu.

There may be several successful paths by top-tier buyers, so we will select to view the top five most-traveled paths by selecting this option from the Report options menu. Or, you can select to view just the top path from the options menu, if you wish.

For the selection of the end touch points of the paths, we will select the Cart Purchasedevent, as we want our report to capture only the paths that resulted in a conversion.

Additional filters can also be applied to this event. For this formula example, we will apply a filter to specify the cart purchase of a particular product, as we want to identify the top paths for customers who converted or purchased a particular product, so that we can apply this insight to the launch of a similar product.

Analyzing the results of our journey report

The journey channel report results show the top five most traveled paths that led to the purchase of our specified product.

Each path shows the channels that customers used to interact with our brand, and the paths are sorted by most traveled in descending order. The report also provides metrics to compare paths by duration, average revenue, and number of unique customers.

If we want to visually compare the top five paths along the time dimension, we can switch to the Time-lapsed view to quickly gauge the time elapsed between individual channels within a path.

Drill into channel activity for deeper insight

Drilling into the most frequently traveled path in the channel summary, we see an aggregate view of the customer interactions that the top-tier buyers completed in the different channels along their path to purchasing our particular product.

By analyzing the interactions of top-tier buyers, we can identify what influenced their purchase.

Perhaps they first opened a promotional email with a 10% discount offer, clicked the email link to the product summary page on the website, and then launched the promotional product video before making their purchase. Or, maybe they were influenced through a social media promotion to visit the product page, and they then downloaded a product brochure before finalizing their purchase. By drilling down into the channel activity, we can uncover what interactions led to conversions and replicate those offerings to support conversions for our new product launch.

While our formula example utilizes journey channel analysis to gain insight into customer journeys, journey reports can also be configured to provide journey pattern analysis to help identify high-impact customer behavior patterns in customer journeys. Armed with deeper insight into your customers’ interactions and journeys using journey reports in Watson CXA, you are better able to replicate successful customer paths, resolve potential issues or customer struggles, and optimize journeys in all channels to increase conversions.

About this blog

The CXA Formula Blog is designed to provide formulas or recipes in using IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics and Tealeaf CX on Cloud. This includes formulas in digital analysis, customer experience analytics, journey analytics, and Universal Behavior Exchange. These formulas are designed to provide you insight and best practices in customer analytics.